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Bioware taking all EA studios
WARCRYtm
Member Posts: 875
Hi all
Have anyone noticed that Bioware is absorving all EA Studios.
First Mityc, that changed to Bioware Mityc,
Than EA2D a flash game studio that was developing games for facebook... changed to Bioware.
Now Victory games(command and Counquer) is Bioware Victory
http://kotaku.com/5867121/what-does-bioware-even-mean-any-more-it-doesnt-mean-command--conquer
Someday EA will change to EA Bioware like Activision Blizzard
Does bioware from old times exist?
Do you trust in that brand has you used to?
Thx for your time
Comments
Haha no didnt mentioned that.
Makes sense though, Bioware has a good name.
But if the name change doesnt include an attitude change, Bioware will be a bad name pretty quick too.
Nothing new for EA.
With UO it was EA Origin, then UO was under Mythic, now under Bioware.
It is just the label where they will collect all their online brands.
It's organizational. Based on general failure in some areas, and new aquisitions and realignment of assets towards those new aquisitions based on their record of greater success, as well as cost cutting by combining.
EA doesn't really seem to know what they're doing in the MMORPG department. I think their problems go too deep, like all the other corporations that are in the MMO space, and that their issues come from themselves and then spread into the new aquisitions that they hand off responsibility to.
Once upon a time....
Well remember that on one hand EA bought Bioware, but BW high managment is in high-managment in EA atm. This ex-CEO of Bioware is not vice-CEO in EA.
EA is just putting Bioware tag on other studios cause Bioware brand SELL games well. Purely marketting and maybe bit organizational thing.
Do I trust Bioware brand as I used to? Lol, no.
This is now diffrent company that company that released Baldur's Gate series or NWN1.
It is not bad 'per se', but Bioware change in how they make games and how they 'show' their story does not apply to me.
Their new ways of doing games is less for my tastes than it used to be.
I replayed BG2 like a year ago and I had a blast!
I bough DA2 and it was AWFUL. Then I tried Swtor beta and while it was better than DA2, I was not impressed and not bough retail and I do not plan to.
They just make games diffrently now and FOR ME they are making worse games even more simplified and streamlined and I just don't trust that they will make game that I WILL enjoy like I enjoyed BG and NWN.
It's just a name.
Bioware gets a lot of positive responses from the gaming community, so they slap it on as many of the divisions as possible in hopes that gamers will associate said division with the original Bioware division.
For example, the new C&C generals is being developed by the new "Bioware Victory" studio... which has absolutely nothing to do with Bioware aside from being under the EA corporate umbrella.
This isn't much different to how Blizzard operates. Diablo 3 has the Blizzard brand stamped on it, but it's not being designed or developed by any of the same people who made Diablo 1 & 2.
These corporate reshuffles are usually done for arcane and convoluted financial reporting reasons, or clever tax exploits (ah, sorry, that should read "tax optimisations"), or both.
EA are most probably trying to "hide" loss-making or poorly performing units under the warm glow of the huge Bioware earnings from the SWTOR launch. Always a good idea to focus shareholders on the good news first.
On the other hand, by attaching a multitude of development units to the Bioware name, EA can leverage the maximum financial return from it. There's a vast amount of people that have huge faith in the Bioware brand. So if EA can print "Bioware" on almost every box they ship, they'll probably make a fortune before the average gamer catches-on to the con.
Definitely planned on trying C&C:G2 anyways, due to C&C:G1 being one of the highpoints of C&C multiplayer (the other being RA2)
Honestly for now Bioware's brand has never been stronger. I was always a bit negative on early Bioware RPGs with their terrible combat (due to using AD&D combat) and they've only gotten better since distancing themselves from a system designed for tabletop RPing. Nowadays I love both the combat and the stories (in particular their character design -- in terms of character dialog -- is unmatched.)
Granted TOR is less excellent regarding character dialog, but still pretty good.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
So from this point on the Bioware name has no credibility. GF
Other way around. Bioware isn't absorbing anything, EA is using Bioware's reputation by slinging their name around as a brand name.
As a development force, the name means absolutely nothing anymore. It is a play to exploit the legacy that Bioware built up for themselves before being bought out by EA. As generations cycle through, people will eventually forget that the name used to mean anything, and it will just be another one of EA's meaningless brands. Then they'll find another established independent studio whose spirit they can bleed dry for a few more years of leeching someone else's brand loyalty.
Watching youtube videos of TOR is a perfect example..Bioware has turned to the darkside lol. All about the bling now...go figure
"I play Tera for the gameplay"
Yeah. Making games people want = total sell-outs.
A real manly company would make a game nobody wants! Sate the niche, screw the rest! Right?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Haha, exactly. Playing an unpopular game that nobody likes = cool for some people.
Ye its personal, Im a old gamer, bin gaming for aslong there are pc's loved nwn1/2 BG ,DA,DA2,ME,ME2 and love SW:TOR
Games for me havent chanced, sure it became more guided and more about effects then mechanics but todays games are not worce when the earlyer games.
EA will always be a company to be beware off, they are after one thing only, youre money. and bioware just simple=EA but EA aint he game makers, they just try to get as mutch money out of any game as they can that does not mean its by defaulth a bad game.
Just make sure to pirate or beta test a game before buying any EA stuff :P
On the topic of 'selling out' that was previously mentioned with Bioware (and Blizzard too for that matter), there honestly is a case to be made. Companies such as Bioware got their start and impressive reputation from developing games with a vision fixed on something fun the *makers* would want to play, as well as appeal to the masses.
No one is going to argue that Blizzard wasn't forced into a shift of adopting a vision of " we will make a product that generates the most revenue by appealing to the largest customer base ". Be it for good or for bad, the vision of their Warcraft / Starcraft roots has shifted radically.
Will Bioware go in this direction as a result of not being the original team and company that exists now as opposed to what it was when it earned their previous reputation?
EA will go after profits at all costs. So the logical results of what will follow isn't very hard to predict.
That's why we Sandboxers are screwed no matter what. Even if SWTOR bombs, you people simply will never believe that players want Sandbox, and will say "if we can't sell SWTOR, we can't sell anything."
Oh, you'll start adding Sandbox features to Themepark games, and that'll help a little, but they'll stil be Themeparks in the end and still not pull as a Sandbox game would.
Of course, if I'm wrong and they have huge success, there will be no looking back ever. Doesn't matter, there won't be anyways, as I said, but it sucks bad to be screwed so fuckeeng hard.
And my horse too.
Once upon a time....
Only screwed in the sense that they'll receive the same trickle of niche games that simulation-lovers have always received. There's always a trickle of games headed towards that niche fanbase, but it's always a trickle.
But as I've said in several threads: a game with a sandbox theme could do impressively well. But it has to be a game first and a world second. And it has to avoid all the pitfalls that cause sandbox games to be unappealing to most players (like letting players ruin each others' fun.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It seems to me a big chunk of players equate this to sandbox. I want to be able to head out and harvest some materials without getting ganked by Stabbyooz and his drooling gang of cronies everytime I set out.
That isn't sandbox, that is just people being jackasses and using sandbox as a way to defend their knuckle-dragging actions.
The type of donkies that would camp the zone lines back on the old RZ server in EQ, those are the jackasses I am talking about. No game needs that type of crap. And it is that type of crap that drives people away from these types of games.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Bah... soon the brand BIOWARE will cease to be what it is... so BEWARE.
It's sad that those that made the golden oldies don't produce games like they used to because they mutated in morlogs.
sounds kinda like Dell and Alienware. Pretty soon there will be nothing of quality left, just the name.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
Soon? They changed direction rather radically after NWN and KOTOR.
But this is common when a studio grows too much, Blizzard ain't the same company that made Diablo and Starcraft anymore either.
Well it's arguably a more "pure" sandbox, as player freedom is the defining theme of a sandbox (and what's more free than letting players be free to screw each other over?) Certainly all of the mainstream sandboxes out there are strongly characterized by open PVP systems where players ruin other players' fun.
But it definitely has no place in a truly successful sandbox MMORPG. Much of Terrarria's and Minecraft's success is owed to their being singleplayer games, and therefore free from bullshit
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Bioware from baldurs gate long gone its money machine now under the wings of EA.
With games like DA2 and TOR is gone easy casual for MASSES with only one thing on there mind how to earn as much as we can.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
A real manly company would make a game nobody wants! Sate the niche, screw the rest! Right?
So in other words bling bling is better then Quality? Selling games is more importend then making games that are Quality yes? Thats why in my view whole mmo business is going down the drain, for that matter also solo games.
Sure masses like it, nice for them but that means quality have to dissapear becouse it won't sell im affraid how many gamers and game developers think these days:(
But you win the avarage joe who love casual and farmville is prolly now 95% of gaming community that just want easy hold hand no substance games witch even a 6 year old can play yeh thats the way we must go, gone with complex hardcore games only jerks/nerds play those right:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
Quality doesn't matter if you make these useless products. No matter how high the quality with those products, people simply don't want them.
Bling is earned with products which are both highly desirable and high quality. So if you're chasing money, you find a product people want (MMORPGs that cut out the bullshit) and produce a very high quality version of that (which ToR seems to be so far.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Agreed mostly. It's actually anti-Sandbox and anti-"realistic" that players are able to play that way (open world PvP) because there really is no means to stop it. "Death" and being looted means nothing to players that win far more than they loose. It's just too easy to set up ambushes, run raids through players that aren't into playing that intense of a PvP game (most players), or just go out and kill newbies or characters built for harvesting resources. Especially when those players can play their "blues" to scout things out, then come on with their "reds" when it suits them. It devolves quickly into a game of King of the Hill, and ruins the Sandbox, which is also Worldly, and replaces it with nothing more than a free-for-all with no real deterent.
In my mind, there are 2 solutions to that problem.
Don't allow the wide open PvP. Guild warfare should suffice for all but the heavy handed jerks.
Allow it, but add heavy punishments for rampant PKing.
Both solutions come with problems, but there are problems no matter what you do. No MMORPG will ever be free of some problem, one way or another, due to the massiveness of the player population. The goal should be Sandbox and Worldly, and entertaining and loaded with both game content and social mechanisms that relate to that game world as opposed to knuckle dragging this way or that.
I'm telling you, this is where the future is. Imagine an MMORPG that combines UO to Skyrim, removes the PK problem, and adds that feeling of being in such a world while players can forge social groups with purpose in that world. Imagine consentration of production being on Skyrim type dungeons and mysteries and lore instead of the current quest lines, which sometimes pretty much equal Skyrim's but usually fall short.
As far as the huge world that would be required, take the hint from Skyrim and develop a lore that can make use of copied content (as in the Dragon nests, numbers of very similar dungeons as like the Dwermer, etc.)
A very exciting world can be created, and even though there's copied content, it's also different by variations, and tied to a mystery. Instead of adding new quests and new levels, add new mysteries and new lore and new storylines with real depth.
Once upon a time....